Billionaire Elon Musk shared a deepfake video of Vice President Kamala Harris manipulated to make it sound like she spoke about President Joe Biden’s “senility” and that she does not “know the first thing about running the country.”
“I, Kamala Harris, am your Democrat candidate for president because Joe Biden finally exposed his senility,” the altered audio says in the video Musk posted to his account on X, formerly Twitter. The audio, which sounds like Harris but is digitally manipulated, goes on to say Harris was chosen “because I am the ultimate diversity hire” as “both a woman and a person of color.”
Musk did not disclose in his post that the video or audio had been manipulated, only writing, “This is amazing 
” in the caption. According to The New York Times, the video was originally posted by X user @MrReaganUSA, who indicated in the post that the video was a “parody.” The altered version of the video parodies a Harris ad titled “We Choose Freedom.”
X’s policies explicitly prohibit “synthetic, manipulated or out-of-context media that may deceive or confuse people and lead to harm.” As of Sunday morning, X had not appended a Community Note to the post. Community Notes are used by the platform to correct misinformation or misleading posts. At the time of this publication, the video had garnered nearly 118 million views.
In a statement obtained by The Times, the Harris campaign said, “The American people want the real freedom, opportunity and security Vice President Harris is offering; not the fake, manipulated lies of Elon Musk and Donald Trump.”
Reacting to the video, Alex Howard, a digital governance expert and the director of the Digital Democracy Project at the Demand Progress Education Fund, posted in response to Musk, “This is a violation of @X’s policies on synthetic media & misleading identities. Are you going to retroactively change them to allow violations in an election year?”
Harris, who has emerged as the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination following President Joe Biden’s decision to exit the race, has earned endorsements from Biden, Barack and Michelle Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, among other Democratic power players.
Deepfakes and AI-altered media have emerged as a disinformation threat in recent years. A Democratic consultant faces criminal charges of voter suppression and a $6 million Federal Communications Commission fine for deepfake audio calls that used an altered version of Biden’s voice to discourage voters from participating in the New Hampshire presidential primary. Last year, the Ron DeSantis campaign shared apparent AI-generated images of Donald Trump hugging infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci. Deepfakes have also been used in attempts to influence elections abroad.
A Brookings report from January noted that “generative AI content has the potential to turbocharge campaigns designed to undermine democratic discourse by making content higher quality, more substantively distinct, and easier to mass produce than past information campaigns launched both domestically and as part of foreign influence operations.”
Many state legislatures have taken on the issue and banned deepfakes in electoral politics. In April the House Oversight Committee held a hearing on the threat deepfakes pose in elections. Just last week, the Senate passed a bill championed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — the DEFIANCE Act — that would ban non-consensual, sexually-explicit, AI-generated imagery. Now it heads to the House. Ocasio-Cortez has been the victim of such deepfakes and first announced the bill in an interview with Rolling Stone.
“There’s a shock to seeing images of yourself that someone could think are real,” Ocasio-Cortez told Rolling Stone. “And once you’ve seen it, you’ve seen it. It parallels the same exact intention of physical rape and sexual assault.”
“It’s time to give victims their day in court and the tools they need to fight back,” Sen. Dick Durbin said when the legislation passed the Senate.
War Is Peace: Trump’s Regime-Change Reversal
As American and Israeli rockets fly into Tehran, with the stated goal of regime change, anyone who bought into the self-evidently absurd idea of “Donald the Dove” ending America’s forever wars ought to be suffering from a bloody form of buyer’s remorse.
It was always bullshit. But that’s what the Trump team was selling hard. Take human ghoul Stephen Miller’s tweet days before the election: “Kamala = WWIII. Trump = Peace.”
The Trump team reads George Orwell’s 1984 like an owner’s manual and so of course “war is peace.” Their undermining of NATO and the dismantling of American alliances in favor of a “might makes right” foreign policy executed by a sycophantic kakistocracy is a guarantee of more war amid autocratic power grabs worldwide, with a side order of corrupt crony capitalism to profit from the chaos.
If you voted for Trump and believed him, this is on you. And that includes self-styled Palestinian peace activists who thought that Biden and Harris were the worst of all possible worlds and stayed home. We will no doubt see protests for the innocent lives lost in these strikes — but I’d have a lot more time for those folks if they were also seen protesting the estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Iranian lives snuffed out by murderous mullahs in the last few months alone.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been despotic and dangerous from its inception. The Iranian people have been oppressed and denied basic freedoms for decades. But this is an extreme example of a war of choice. The American military strikes against Iran’s nuclear weapons facility last year were justified because Iran cannot be trusted with a nuclear weapon. That is true. But the much trumpeted total obliteration of those facilities is apparently not true — or so goes the justification for this war. And don’t forget that it was Trump who pulled the U.S. out of an Obama-era deal to stop Iran from developing weapons — arguing absurdly that the imperfect anti-nuke deal needed to be blown up to stop Iran from developing a bomb. Iran’s subsequent progress toward a bomb then created the rationale toward these strikes. This is a self-inflicted state of emergency. Peace is war and war is peace.
Pity the willful dupes in Congress who deluded themselves into thinking that Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. They’ll probably rationalize that he would’ve been peaceful if he got the honor. Now it will be read as a cautionary tale for not sucking up. The chairman of the Board of Peace is now bored of peace. While Rand Paul remains admirably consistent, it’s Lindsey Graham who is pirouetting around the Senate floor while the Gimp Speaker Mike Johnson is unable to speak for the basic constitutional principles of separation of powers let alone authorization to go to war.
If you’re feeling shell-shocked trying to keep up with Operation Epstein Distraction, get ready for the inevitable next crisis — regime change without a plan for replacement. This is what the Trump administration did in Venezuela — kidnapping the socialist dictator Maduro but keeping his regime in place in exchange for crude oil access. The opposition is still in exile and its leader María Corina Machado gave her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump in exchange for exactly nothing.
One of the clear lessons of history is that if you don’t win the peace, you don’t win the war. The Saudis and their Sunni allies will back the U.S. and Iran because they hate the Shia Iranians (who, incidentally, are not Arabs), but beyond removing the Iranian regime, the plans for replacement and stabilization seem TBD — and with Trump’s inability to stay focused on anything beyond his immediate self-interest, solid plans are unlikely to emerge. Maybe a leader will come from the underground opposition; maybe it will be the Shah’s son, who has been living in the U.S. waiting for a restoration like many members of the diaspora. The upside is that Iran has a distinguished history and an accomplished Persian culture: The Islamists don’t represent the entirety of the people of Iran and never have.
But the path ahead will be messy at best. It will require concerted effort and civil commitment, not just an open call for private investment from Mar-a-Lago members. If the United States is now kidnapping and killing dictators without direct provocation, it establishes a dangerous precedent which will come back to bite us after demolishing our moral authority in the world.
It is the unexpected effects, the cascades of consequence where we cannot always plan ahead, that cause most responsible statesmen to try to keep the peace. But Trump has the carelessness of a rich-boy bully who can always buy or bluster his way out of trouble. He’s a con man who has found his ultimate mark in his followers, who fool themselves into thinking that a reflexive liar is the one man with the courage to tell the truth.
Perhaps the most prominent example is the vice president himself — a bright guy who not that long ago compared Trump to Hitler and a deadly narcotic but then convinced himself that careerism demanded an abrupt conversion. After all, he endorsed Trump less than two years ago with this very serious column headlined “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars,” explaining, “He has my support in 2024 because I know he won’t recklessly send Americans to fight overseas.”